Federico Viticci

10788 posts on MacStories since April 2009

Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.

Find My iPad Comes to MobileMe

TUAW

“Find My iPad has the same features as Find My iPhone, including playing the little sonar sound effect with an onscreen message (in case your iPad falls behind the couch or something). Find My iPad also includes the same Remote Wipe feature as Find My iPhone – so if your iPad is irretrievably lost, you can remotely vaporize all the data on it, thus ensuring that thieves don’t get access to your contacts, credit card info, or embarrassing lolcat pictures in addition to your iPad”


Cloud App Goes Public, Reviewed.

We’re always looking for new apps. We’re always looking forward to that new app which should revolutionize the way we work. Apply this statement to file sharing (a way too crowded market on Mac OS X) and you’ll see thousands of people eagerly talking about Droplr, Tinygrab, whatever. There are at least 20 similar file sharing apps that I know, and while some of them are really good pieces of software, most of them are crap, period.

I think it’s impossible to review Cloud app by Linebreak without mentioning the fact that these guys managed to build a tremendous hype around their first mainstream application: back when Cloud was nothing but an icon, I remember everyone was talking about this new app which had a great looking icon and was every Mac user’s wet dream. Nice, we all started following the Twitter account. Cloud was then released as ultra-closed beta, and a few designers had the chance to put their hands on it and tease us on Twitter about how awesome it was. Again, we bookmarked a Twitter search for the terms “Cloud Mac”. Last, Linebreak opened even more spots for the beta, and we reviewed an early version of Cloud. It impressed us. It was easy to use, fast, useful, customizable, definitely Mac-like. But still, it wasn’t finished. Hell no, it needed more work, more refinements, more features, new servers - whatever it takes to be the champion.

To stand out from the crowd of file sharing apps.

Now, Cloud has finally gone public. And it’s way better than before.

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First Look: Phases HD by Bjango

The Bjango guys make beautiful apps, and that’s a given. We’ve just found out that Phases, the neat app already available on the iPhone that shows you all kinds of information about the moon, is now available in the iPad App Store, with an HD moniker and priced at $1.99.

The new version looks great and brings all the features you know from the iPhone version onto the iPad. Screenshots available after the break.

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Auditorium for iPad: Most Beautiful Notes Taking App Yet?

Developed by App-Apps.com, Auditorium is a new application to take notes and organize meetings and lectures in one single, convenient place. You can create folders, “record” events, share items with your collaborators. But most of all, it’s beautiful. From the leather background  in the sidebar, to the custom designed top bar, the developers have put a lot of attention to the details. Auditorium is currently awaiting Apple’s approval, we’ll keep you posted about it. We’ve got two screenshots of the app, be sure to check them out.

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iPad Springboard Breaks Spatiality

Latest post from Lukas Mathis:

“Let’s say you want to open the App Store on your iPad, and you know that you’ve put this icon at the bottom right of your apps. Turning the iPad shuffles the positions of your icons. The App Store now suddenly jumps to the middle of the second row.

While rewrapping is fine for text, it’s not okay for things the user has intentionally arranged in a specific way. Instead, Apple should make sure that the arrangement is preserved. Since there is so much space between individual applications, this could possibly be achieved without shrinking the actual icons, simply by moving them closer to each other.”


An interesting point.



Take This, Flash: Apple Posts iPad-Ready Websites

“iPad features Safari, a mobile web browser that supports the latest web standards — including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Here are just a few of the sites that take advantage of these web standards to deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad.”

The page is available here. You can also submit your site.


A Trend Already: Widgets-like Websites with Sites App

Two days ago we previewed DashApp for iPad, an upcoming application that should enable you to view multiple websites at once, as if they’re widgets. Turns out there’s a similar application already approved by Apple, it’s called “Sites” and it’s got a lot of features that could make it the worst enemy of DashApp.

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